The subject matter disclosed herein relates generally to tracking locations of patients, equipment, and staff in a medical facility and, more particularly, tracking locations of patients, equipment, and staff using more than one location tracking system.
To track locations of patients, equipment, and staff, a medical facility may employ one of many available location tracking systems. Such systems may include a static location system based on the Health Level Seven (HL7) medical communications protocol or a real-time location system (RTLS) that may generate location information in real time. Generally, an HL7-based system may include location assertions entered by medical personnel, such as patient hospital bed assignment. RTLS-generated location information may be provided in real time using any number of real-time tracking methods, such as tracking the location of radio frequency identification (RFID) or infrared (IR) tags associated with patients, equipment, or staff.
Each of the above-described location tracking systems may have limitations. For example, location assertions from an HL7-based system may bear little relation to an actual physical location of a patient for large blocks of time. Using an HL7-based location system, a patient's real location may be unknown between admission and room occupancy, during smoking breaks, or while receiving diagnostic treatment in radiology or other service departments. Moreover, in a busy area such as the emergency department (ED) or operating room (OR), an HL7-based location system may be particularly ineffective as a patient may be frequently moved from place to place. Thus, a patient's location may be completely unknown for hours in such locations, as departmental and admissions/discharge/transfer (ADT) systems may not update a patient's location in a sufficiently rapid manner.
Conversely, RTLS-based location readings may be subject to varying levels of granularity depending on the nature of the RTLS infrastructure in a medical facility. For example, an RTLS-based location reading may indicate that a patient has moved from one department to another, but the real-time tracking signal associated with the patient may be non-specific in certain large areas, such as a post-anesthesia care unit (PACU) or the ED. In particular, an RTLS-location reading may be especially imprecise in areas that include multiple bays and/or curtains separating one patient from another. Under such circumstances, an RTLS-based system may report that a patient is in a given area, but may not report the particular bay or curtain area where the patient is currently situated.